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“Men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 classic, Walden, and so confirms the Gallup organization based on recent surveys of 25 million people in 189 countries. Work frustrates rather than fulfills almost 90 percent of the world’s workforce. Most people work because they need money, but scholars have long known that money is not what people most want from work....

Like his parents and grandparents before them, Edilberto “Beto” García Cuenca started farming the land when he was just a kid. The descendant of a long lineage of “campesinos”—a Spanish term for family farmer—he still grows maize in the small, five-acre plot his mom left him in their hometown of Santa María Zacatepec in the Mexican state of Puebla. He also plants beans to keep the soil fertile and relies on rain to irrigate his crops....

In late 2004 the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to breast-feed. Had the then-67-year-old Hoffman—who brought mainstream culture face to face with autism in Rain Man and went mano a mano with an Ebola-like filovirus in Outbreak—never quite broken character from his 1982 film Tootsie? Nope. He was just really keen to help out with his first grandchild. Interestingly, he could have possibly lent a helping, er, breast, if he had held the suckling newborn to his nipples for a couple weeks although he could also have tried starving himself or taking a medication that would affect his brain’s pituitary gland....

A hotly anticipated experiment will test the theory next month that the moon’s permanently shadowed polar craters harbor pockets of water ice. A NASA spacecraft called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will perform a two-stage bombardment of a south polar crater to see what rises up in the ensuing debris plume. Now, just two weeks before LCROSS’s scheduled barrage, comes a suite of evidence that the moon indeed hosts water....

A Latina essential worker who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, drove an hour and a half south to the nearest pharmacy where she could get her COVID vaccination. When she arrived, staff asked for identification, and she showed them her El Salvador passport. They then asked for a U.S. ID and social security number. She did not have either of them because she is undocumented, and she panicked (even though proof of legal residency was not required for getting a vaccine)....

Glenn Close’s unforgettably vivid portrayal in the movie Fatal Attraction gave viewers a front-row look at the damaging mental illness known as borderline personality disorder (BPD). By itself, this ailment accounts for up to 10 percent of patients under psychiatric care and 20 percent of those who have to be hospitalized. The defining characteristic is pervasive instability in the patient’s life, especially in relationships. People who suffer from BPD also have difficulty controlling their impulses and regulating their emotions....

Editor’s Note: On Jan. 18, diplomats from 65 countries at the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva will try to agree to begin talks on a treaty that would stop the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Cutting off production of fissile materials for weapons could provide the basis for irreversible reductions of all nuclear weapons. In the article below, Alexander Glaser, Zia Mian and Frank von Hippel, all at Princeton University and affiliated with the International Panel on Fissile Materials, propose the basic pillars of a fissile material cutoff treaty, how compliance with such a treaty could be verified and who should pay the tab....

Humans are wired to be awake during the day and sleep at night, but millions of Americans defy biology to pull the graveyard shift. Hospital employees, firefighters and, increasingly, office workers all punch in for nighttime work. These nocturnal schedules appear to be one driver of the rising rates of obesity and metabolic disorders. Yet exactly how swapped slumber time fuels metabolic disarray has largely mystified sleep researchers. Daytime shuteye, for one reason or another, simply is not as restful for humans....

I hate clouds. Not because they sometimes bring rain but because they are hard. Clouds come in all shapes and sizes: wispy, high cirrus, puffy cumulus, the low, gray stratocumulus layers that blanket gloomy days. This great diversity makes it difficult to predict how clouds will react worldwide as the earth’s atmosphere changes. Climate scientists like me know from reams of data that the earth will warm up this century and beyond....

Giving some of the world’s poorest people a two-year aid package—including cash, food, health-care services, skills training and advice—improves their livelihoods for at least a year after the support is cut off, according to the results of an experiment involving more than 10,000 households in six countries. The poverty intervention had already been trialled successfully in Bangladesh, and the study’s researchers say it shows the approach works in other cultures too....

LONDON, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is to invest $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital fund that brings together industry and government to seek treatments for the brain-wasting disease. The investment - a personal one and not part of Gates’ philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - will be followed by another $50 million in start-up ventures working in Alzheimer’s research, Gates said....

Humans have been locked in a struggle with disease-carrying mosquitoes for most of recorded history. With just two bites—one to pick up a pathogen and another to transmit it—the bugs have fueled countless outbreaks. Malaria exploded across Africa as humans first gathered for agricultural development. Yellow fever nearly wiped out Memphis, Tenn., in the 1870s as urbanization and river transport brought infected people and mosquitoes together. Some archaeologists suspect that mosquito-borne disease even hastened the fall of the Roman Empire....

Warning signs are flashing red: California faces another scary year for extreme wildfires. More than 93 percent of the state is in severe or extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. And a March 1 reading of the state’s snowpack found it way below normal — just 63 percent of the average for that date. That’s not all. California hillsides are turning brown with dead and dying grass — potential kindling for the next inferno....

NASA scientists have planned a spectacular celestial show for July 4th. That’s the date on which a probe from the Deep Impact spacecraft is scheduled to slam into Comet Tempel 1 in an attempt to learn more about the comet’s billion-year-old interior. New images snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope are giving researchers a sneak peak at what type of conditions they might find. The pictures show a new jet of dust streaming out of the icy object....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. Women’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2 is stronger than men’s immune response to the virus, according to a study published 8/26/20 in Nature and covered the same day by Apoorva Mandavilli at The New York Times. The finding could explain why men “are twice as likely to become severely sick and to die [from COVID-19] as women of the same age,” Mandavilli writes....

Pregnant With Implications Cesarean sections declined in the seven years following 1989, when U.S. birth certificates first recorded methods of delivery. But recently they have spiked. Proposed explanations include an increase in multiple births and in the number of women more likely to have a C-section, such as those who are older, overweight or diabetic.—Brie Finegold Percent of births delivered by cesarean section in: 2004: 29.1 1996: 20.7 1989: 22.8 Percent increase in twin births, 1990 to 2003: 37....

It was a moderate hurricane whose damage seemed tame compared to the destruction five years earlier from Hurricane Maria. But in the weeks since Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has given emergency aid to far more residents of the U.S. territory than after Maria demolished the islands, records show. The startling contrast is the most visible example of how policy shifts by the Biden administration since 2021 have made it easier for people in disaster areas to qualify for emergency cash, housing aid and supplies....

A group of 21 climate-conscious kids is suing the U.S. government over global warming, accusing the defendants of endangering the young plaintiffs’ lives, liberty and property via the extensive use of fossil fuels. They are backed by the environmental advocacy group Our Children’s Trust, which has supported similar lawsuits in other states, but this is the first time such an action has come this far, after a federal judge ruled that they have constitutional grounds to press their case....

Hurricane Ida, which cut a path of destruction from Louisiana to New York last year, is being recognized as one of the most destructive storms in U.S. history and the world’s costliest natural disaster in 2021. But the Category 4 hurricane also is becoming a poster child for government spending on flood protection. Analysts say Ida would have caused much more damage and many more deaths if federal taxpayers had not spent $14 billion rebuilding and strengthening New Orleans-area levees after Hurricane Katrina in 2005....

Something strange was hiding in the Horsehead. The nebula, named for its stallionlike silhouette, is a towering cloud of dust and gas 1,500 light-years from Earth where new stars are continually born. It is one of the most recognizable celestial objects, and scientists have studied it intensely. But in 2011 astronomers at the Institute of Millimeter Radioastronomy (IRAM) and elsewhere probed it again. With IRAM’s 30-meter telescope in the Spanish Sierra Nevada, they homed in on two portions of the horse’s mane in radio light....